Thanks for your help!

Yes, you are right fat slows down the absorption of sugars, so does fiber and protein. I suggest that as a way to eat if you are not on my 30 Sugar Free Day program (one of the e-mails actually deals with this exact subject). I would encourage you to use fiber first, make sure you are eating enough high fiber vegetables and fruits with the meal and then consider adding in protein and fat.

Hope that helps!

Scott

My daughter is a Type 1 diabetic and I have found this to be true with her body. So my question is this: If fat slows the absorption down then is it okay to have the potato family with a fat?

I know this helps the blood sugar imbalance issue but I am wondering if this stops the affect to the brain that you have mentioned in this article. Thanks for your insight!

Scott

I am seeking your permission to use some of your comments for one of my patients who is strongly addicted to sugar and who I am just about to take through dietry changes. Would it be okay if I could please use the some of the principles in or order to help a desperate and unhappy lady? Thank you.

Regards

Viv

I am a Crohns patient, I feel constantly nauseous. In order to avoid actually vomiting, I keep a can of Coke nearby. For some reason other soft drinks don’t quite do it. Perhaps it’s the phosphor that Coke contains and other soft drinks don’t. But I will drink another in a pinch. Small sips through out the day must quell the rising gorge which seems to be based on concentration of bile. Glucose is the over-the-counter anti-emetic (anti-vomit) med sold at your pharmacy. There is Promethazine, which makes me waay too sleepy I can’t even drive. Or Zofran, which is excellent but is extremely expensive. The downside of sugar doesn’t outweigh the suffering.

Not true

In 1995 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review of 23 comparatively rigorous studies conducted between 1982 and 1994. These were your classic controlled double-blind affairs: two groups of kids, one fed a bunch of sugar, the other given a placebo (i.e., artificial sweetener), everyone kept sufficiently in the dark as to who’d gotten what, etc.

The results? No discernible relationship between sugar ingested and how the kids acted. It didn’t matter how old they were, how much sugar they got, what their diets were like otherwise — nothing. The JAMA authors stopped shy of drawing any definitive conclusions, but if there were a legitimate sugar-high effect out there, you’d like to see it turn up in the lab every so often.

Given that so far it hasn’t, why would a sizable chunk of the child-rearing population continue to swear it exists? For a crucial piece of the puzzle we turn to the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and a 1994 study by Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, in which they looked at 31 boys ages five to seven and their mothers, all of whom had described their offspring as being “behaviorally affected by sugar.”

The mom-son teams were split into the customary two groups: the moms in one were told their sons would be given extra-sugary Kool-Aid, while the others were told their kids were in the control group and would get a drink sweetened with aspartame. In reality, though, the same artificially sweetened stuff was administered to both sets of kids while the women got a sheaf of surveys to fill out. Mothers and children were then videotaped playing together, after which the moms were asked how they thought things went.

What did Hoover and Milich find? You guessed it: the moms who thought they were in the sugar group said their sons acted more hyper. In addition, they tended to hover over their children more during play, offer more criticism of their behavior, etc. The mother-son pairs in the other group were judged by observers to be getting along better. What’s more, those moms who, going into the experiment, most strongly believed their kids were sugar-sensitive also scored highest on a test designed to gauge cognitive rigidity.

From there, of course, it’s not too hard to whip up a hypothesis explaining why the sugar-high myth persists. Having always heard that sugar makes kids act crazy, some parents, particularly those hailing from the control-freak end of the spectrum, may go a little crazy themselves when the sugary stuff enters the picture. In situations where sweets are freely available to their children — like birthday parties or other high-stimulation events — they watch worriedly for any sign of obstreperousness, see it even if it’s not there, call it hyperactivity, and attribute it to the cookies and cake. Kids, meanwhile, typically aren’t oblivious to this sort of anxiety; consciously or not, they may well figure out that after taking on a load of candy they’re expected to run amok and happily oblige.

when a parent freaks out because a swig of soda has allegedly made his kid uncontrollable, it’s quite possible he’s not just seeing the behavior he expects to see, he’s helping create it.

— Cecil Adams